Seems to me Anand equalized easily in this game. Topalov was true to his no draw proclamation, and it took more than the obligatory three-fold repetition at the end before the arbiter stepped in to offer the draw on his behalf. By the way, I was watching the live video feed closely during this final spectacle and didn’t see a handshake. Hmmm… interesting. Clearly, we’re in for a fighting World Chess Championship!

After a one-day delay due to Anand’s travel woes caused by the volcano in Iceland, the 2010 World Chess Championship is underway! It was a brutal affair with Veselin Topalov absolutely blasting Viswanathan Anand off the board with the white pieces when the latter misplayed a seemingly risky Gruenfeld line after a succession of quick moves by both sides.

Just testing out the Embed Chessboard WordPress Plugin with this post. For your viewing pleasure, “all” eleven games of the 2008 World Chess Championship between Kramnik and Anand which saw the latter winning by a score of 6.5-4.5.

What do you think (both about the match and plugin)? How’s this player compare to some of the others I’ve used in the past? (Next time, I’ll try it with some annotated games, assuming it can handle them.)

EDIT: Now that I’ve published this, I can see it leaves an ugly amount of space when you have a list of games queued up. I’m guessing it uses the longest game to carve out a spot for the Javascript.

EDIT2: Even worse, it also turned out to be a little flakey, sometimes not displaying at all, other times taking forever to load. I may try it one more time yet, but just with a single annotated game. We’ll see.